While working on some example region contents for Manteu, I tried to lean into my keying mantra, a principle so simple as to be obvious, but which is easy to forget. "What is the most interesting thing that could be here?" If your setting could have Dracula, put his castle in a place it might be found. If your setting has a pope, put her on the map. If your setting emulates some genre, encode places and situations where the cool stuff of that genre can show up.
This list will give the verbatim notes I made in free minutes at work one day in bold, and commentary in italics.
d100 Manteu fills
1. Judas. I was always very impressed with the Halton brothers' Hexcrawl of the Marcher Lords, which has Judas Iscariot in the very first keyed hex. Introducing a character who looms large in both real legends and the worldview of the characters is a great way to make setting details feel practical and important, and unlike meeting Charlemagne or Aragorn, Judas doesn't have great capability that would trivialize common challenges for the party or some great project he should get up to that might overshadow them.
2. Guy Fawkes Revolutionaries I don't know that much about the early 17th century, so I quickly started reaching for historical episodes outside France. I think people like big-hatted revolutionaries as characters, and the basics of the Gunpowder Plot can be easily adapted to the milieu. I imagine the region would have a secret cell of revolutionaries, with some sign the PCs might interact with, like a merchant trying to purchase arms and powder and asking them to be on the lookout for some.
3. Merican Pretender Earl Stafford Blanche-Boilingsex, the "real king" of Merica. Such figures always find powerful hosts, and by virtue of their precarious station make great supporting NPCs. The players might want to help him get onto the throne, or get paid to kidnap him, or want to convince him to support the things they care about. If you're going to define the areas surrounding the setting of the campaign, it's nice to have some notable characters from those places. Plus it's always fun to do a posh English voice as a change of pace from an otherwise non-English milieu.
4. Lady Dracula. Potential patron, seeking those who can secure her an estate in En Plus Paris. Horrific deathtrap. Great monkey wrench for existing romances with her predatory charms. Probably can't truly fall for your gallant PC unless they find her hidden heart, and even then it's more work than just trying to kill her. Should give a good bonus for true love.
5. Odinic Musketeer. Another cheap trick. Blesses the gallant and hospitable. Curses the mealaday and suspicious.
6. Heretical Cathedral Can seem at first like a somewhat helpful base of operations, but has the fun character of hiding Huguenots or something worse. Cathedrals are nice because it's easy to imagine what their native NPCs might be like, what problems they may have, what objects they may seek, and to afflict them with ghosts and skeletons and the like.
7. Grendelle-infected wolves Wolves that ain't right is a great cheap trick. They are numerous and weird, and no one will doubt that they'll track you down if you try to move through the region. You get a twofer here, getting to do stuff with wolves and a unique monster.
8. Court of Miracles Good opportunity for the low-status PCs to shine. Great way to find rumors or get into trouble.
9. Beggar King Ditto
10. Fay sorcerer charlatan Nice to make a social problem with a very punchable problem hidden underneath
11. Pilgrimage site The hair of Saint Enilla, torn apart by Vikings. Good place to find people from far off lands.
12. Princess in disguise Simple mysteries are good enrichment for players. Give the nameless chevalier a notable tic or interest, and have the king's seneschal mention that the missing princess has that same trait a few sessions later.
13. Pirate waylayers People love pirates
14. Treasure Island People love pirates, and love treasure maps
15. Panopticon The Bentham jail. Good place to get thrown into, good place to have to get someone out of, good place for random bandits to be from.
16. Envoy of Prester John Like entry 1 but more obscure, mingle myth and happenstance
17. False Grail Again not knowing so much about the early 17th century, I started bringing in the older stuff and the romantic tales of the past. To preserve the sense of time, I feel like it's important to keep the older stuff feeling older. A grail relic that's an old tourist attraction, or a site that claims to have once held the holy grail seems about right for that.
18. Excaliber (sic) It's cool to have a kickass +5 sword that gets you in trouble somewhere on the map. Because of the themes of the setting, I might have it as the sword of the mythic paladin Roland, guarded by an old hermit who will only consider mentioning it if the PCs mention some great need.
19. Robin Hood Again adapting a British thing, but like pirates and revolutionaries, people love jovial outlaws. Giving him a penchant for black powder and Huguenot sympathies can embed him well enough in this setting. Can serve as an ally, a problem, a regional hazard, a bitter enemy, a rival suitor, or a beau.
20. Mustard Smugglers Once I read an article in which the author boasted they never set up interesting events or situations in their games so that players could find them unless they went really far out of the their way to get involved in them, using the example of mustard smuggling in Dijon. It's still really funny to me. Oh, and players love smugglers of uncommon kinds of items.
21. Nomad Meetup Players like nomads and want them to like them. As nomads famously move around, you have to think of a place they're more likely to be when keying regions.
22. Hidden Templar Cache Probably the way to do this is to have the region contain the first clue in a multi-step treasure hunt, driving PCs to explore new regions and backtrack to old landmarks. People like treasure hunts.
23. Charlegmagne (sic) Paladin trapped Perhaps it's that Roland guy from before. Howling often heard from within a cairn or a massive half-submerged boulder sometimes shaking. Open it and you'll free a well-intentioned but outdated guy with 20 HD.
24. evil horse Not sure exactly what I meant by this. Maybe there are rumors of a deadly horse in the region, but can be tamed and ridden as a mostly-loyal bad boy horse with a cool ability, like turning into mist for a few seconds, or fangs.
25. incredible highwayman Queering the high-status/low-status distinction. Anyone worth their salt can come up with six options for funny robber tactics or weird affectations or secret identities.
26. ghost of massacred Huguenots Simple, unsubtle storytelling. May be calmed by deeds the presumably-Catholic PCs would feel uncomfortable doing. Could be they have to seek out the help of a Huguenot "priest", but he's likely to want help in return.
27. Agincourt Holdouts Like post-WWII holdouts, but they're all 80-year-old archers with Northern accents.
28. Angelic writing just splayed across a hillside. Angels are apparently a big deal, but you probably can't see them, so signs of their actions remind you they're around. Because it's writing, you can try to translate it if it's unreadable, or attempt to interpret it if it's French but cryptic.
29. Traitor to Spain That is, a local noble acting on behalf of Spain. Happy to host you in his castle and ask what you're up to, and listen to rumors you've heard. Has a suspicious amount of gold.
30. Grandiose wolf-hunter starfort Headquarters of boneheaded but dangerous zealots. Good allies if you're actually hunting a wolf, good cloud cover for anyone trying to frame wolves for their murders. Another versatile region content.
31. Monks healing amnesiac detenu. Easy to hitch up to a PC's life history.
32. helpful nuns Often we see clergy in these sorts of games only when they're weird. It's good to make sure to have some random, basically friendly NPCs like this.
33. Hrothgar If monsters are to be called Grendelles, I might as well have at least a few sad noblemen in remote villages, their manses occupied by freak monsters.
34. Unicorn woods Another medieval throwback, but people like unicorns and it would be fun to take the modern musketeer's romantic milieu as a development of and counterpoint to old-fashioned chivalry
35. Ruins of Lancelot's castle I bet I could make players sad here.
36. Merlin's pupil They call her Nimue I think. A fay magician with noble pedigree but maybe she buried her mentor (girlboss!). Just seems like an interesting character with versatile use.
37. Iron-masked bandits Reusing the images of the source material in a new context
39. Academy under siege I think it's around here in the list that I remembered I wanted a very warful Manteu, with platoons of soldiers wandering around. This is a fun way to introduce a small army, give it something to do, but ensure it sticks around long enough that we don't have to worry about it too much.
40. Gunsmith innovators Provide cool prototype guns in exchange for fat sums. A pistol you fire once, rotate, and fire a second shot out the butt. A musket with seven barrels arranged in a fan. Real for-real versions of those fake guns from the House on the Rock
41. Evil, powerful sword Like Excaliber (sic), it's fun to have a Stormbringer. The rules normally let you spare those you defeat in a duel, but perhaps this bloodthirsty blade forces the deathblow. Maybe it confers also the Lupe's ferocity ability.
42. Faust's Folio Imbued with MD and graces-- summoning shades of the dead or myriad charms
43. Beastman gentleman recluse I think I was imagining a send-up of the classic Beauty and the Beast novel. A good potential suitor, potential threat.
44. Well to Hell Good hazard, good excuse to introduce some dangerous wandering monsters. Creative methods of traversal also make this a shortcut to a different country to explore, if players want to leave Manteu for a change of pace.
45. Roman Lich Not sure the best way to situate such a figure. Maybe stealing and interrogating damosels from a submerged Pompeii-like village, or fixing up some ancient fort.
46. King's Hometown w/ secret This one seems like it would require more footwork to get the core of the idea, but I do like the idea of randomly finding a small town that has a clear connection to the country's most majorest figure. Could be concealing a secret daughter, a childhood swaperoo, or other juicy fact.
47. Phantom of the Opera This is 250 years off from the setting inspiration, but it is French, which goes a long way. We love to see a romantic make a giant half-submerged deathtrap dungeon.
48. Eternal Fay Masque Honestly on second thought I don't like this suggestion as much. Having a masque is very cool, but it might be better if it's monthly or something. Get a chance to get to know local and elfin powers when they're undisguised, but have to enter the masque to get in contact with the powerful Lord of Winter, or evade the antimortal prejudice that prevents you from accessing the juicy goss or impressing the Comte D'Mushrooms.
49. Possessed exorcist in church
50. Hermitage of treasure hunter repentent (sic) Like the entry on the Templar treasure cache, I imagined this might be a good way to set off a treasure hunt. The hunter could have been one of a craze of people seeking the embezzled riches of Lord L'Sanbraise which never turned up even after his disappearance, and she might have some breakthrough clue she will not use herself.
51. Cursed deck of cards Make people play Poker or Basset to get redraws of your favorite Deck of Many Things.
52. Man who totally resembles the King Another flexible element to incorporate into a player scheme, or if they're straightlaced a treasure to give to the king.
53. Lady of forest Fort is secret Wolf In picaresque episodiques, you want to hit a certain number of monster-of-the-week plots, just barely complicated enough to fill a session. In this case, I might have the lady of the fort offer to host traveling gallants for a few days, perhaps because one is nominally her relative, or because she is infatuated with one. Also, it's funny when someone is secretly something that "should" be obvious. Lady D'Ourseville
54. Masked duelist leads guerilla (sic) war Sort of a lucha Zoro guy to fulfill Grace's take on the lutteur. Plus another excuse to throw a small army around. Who is the target? By default, I suppose a lord partisan to the queen or king, or perhaps Spanish occupiers.
55. excellent bureaucrat is exile is the devil An excellent secretary, the sort of person who would be a very good retainer, running things for a local village. I would probably lay it on thick here so players understood the allure. "What a shame, his skills wasted in the countryside," one peasant laments. "Yes, but how lucky for us!" her friend replies."
56. Mausoleum conceals weapon lab Like with other secrets, this wants a clue or tell. I'd do something gothic or spooky as a sort of red herring, like having lighting strike the mausoleum every night (but not because it's haunted, because it's powering some kind of thunder-tines imbuing ball lightning into cutlasses).
57. Alleged angel mayor bans nobles Flavorful "locked" region that can't be easily entered.
58. Abbey at war with bird men I don't remember what I wanted to do for this, except that it was inspired by Mattimeo.
59. Micro-region of hated ethnic group Hated minorities seem like a neutral setting element, but in fact they are straight upside for most groups of PCs, who never seem to bring themselves to be as callous and unjust to them as the NPCs are, and are likely to win the alliance of the disadvantaged.
60. bandit mountain sanctuary Hidden monster lairs are neat work because they come with their own clues-- monsters showing up periodically
61. noble's mountain redoubt, great secret Now, what did I mean by "great secret?" Probably something related to the noble in question, who I imagined as a major figure in En Plus Paris or other major city. A secret daughter or second husband, say, or a Most Dangerous Game preserve.
62. Asylum town threatened by ghost There's good potential in showing the players something straightforwardly good and nice, like an accepting community dedicated to creating a healthy environment for the mental recovery of guests, then threatening it.
63. cave academy with a revelation By "revelation," I think I meant an important secret setting detail that isn't per se hidden but that requires academic work to uncover. Without prep, I might resort to a cellular cosmogony model of the world, or useful information about the nature of the devil, or love.
64. spirit of wisdom locked in a castle
65. Back way into the City of the Mind
66. Necropolis to speak w/ dead I think it would be neat if you could take dead bodies to some weird location to get information from them. A classic "Special" area in a dungeon.
67. Land poisoned by Letarrasque Simple travel hazard that foreshadows a major danger elsewhere in the country.
68. Dragon becomes a hot man Like Lady Dracula, this introduces a potential suitor who is also a great danger. You might not need to set up any special situation for them; it's easy to imagine a curious dragon just turning into a (naked?) guy and walking up to PCs on the road.
69. Devil selling magic bullets Freischutz, a very German figure of folklore, is not French. But he does seem like a transferable character with a cool magic item. Maybe he's from Inferie.
70. Horses act like wolves Freaky!
71. Wild Hunt I'm embarrassed to say that while I've heard of the Wild Hunt, I don't think I truly grasp the vibe or storytelling potential it offers. But I suspect it's right for this.
72. Great smith lacks ingredient Simple """"quest""". Potential ingredients: weather vane of a deconsecrated church, the blood of a king, or the tears of true love.
73. Hostile spooky woods Classic simple hazard. I would make this especially nasty to emphasize that your average PC gallant is not the overland travel freak that is common in OSR games.
74. secretly occupied town Very polite guards offer escort, trying not to let slip that anything is amiss.
75. leper-musketeer guards weird town Desperate not to get anyone infected, their profession puts them in a situation where they might risk it. Perhaps this town is weird because it houses an especially dangerous grendelle, and that's why pre-doomed musketeers are desired as guards.
76. evil fox mayor I was definitely thinking of Reynard the Fox, but that doesn't give a specifically good affordance for mayoring. Maybe he's the husband of the mayor, who utterly refuses to believe that he isn't a fox in disguise.
77. Bluebeard. Seems like a great suitor A trap, but for suitoring. It's very nice to come up with texture and dangers for the specific picadillos of a game's premise.
78. demon huntsman VS Huguenot stag A region in chaos because of the competition of two forces. Both weird and confusing, either plausibly able to get help from the party. Perhaps the huntsman wants help, driving the stag into his trap; while the stag seeks to trap the huntsman in the old overgrown hermitage.
79. short-sighted mutiny I'm imagining a platoon of soldiers tired of manual labor, ready to start cutting throats and seizing travellers on the off chance of getting a ransom.
80. Platoon imprisoning alchemist The party should find evidence the alchemist is guarded against her will, perhaps finding messages in a bottle thrown down the river.
81. evil night horse + haunted house See entry 24. I think I was sleepy.
82. Goblin Hole Inspired by the "Gap of Goeblin", a French folklore thing that wikipedia never gets around to describing, but I like to imagine a small hole in the side of a cliff by the side of the road that leads to a secret goblin country. Who knows in what soils fed etc. etc.
83. Gothic wildmen (French cavemen) People like cavemen.
84. Half-dragons war with their mother Another two-forces-at-war region. Many players will be loathe to contend with a dragon if they have a chance, but by setting up forces against the dragon already it increases the chances they'll try to help. I might have three half-dragons, capable of assuming human form and only surviving this far because their mother is unwilling to destroy them. One wants to catch her up in a giant cage (stupid), wants to get several hundred people together for a murder mob (stupid), and one wants to find a hottie to seduce her and get her guard down (but will fall in love with the person they hire, stupid).
85. Noble looking to abduct a husband Woah, equality 😳
86. Lutteur takes all comers, aided by evil snake (In a fight)
87. Fortune teller dire wolf In many OSR games, sages are the first resort of a party interested in learning about magic items or important history. These figures usually dispense information for gold, a way to prevent depending too much on them. In the C&S paradigm, PCs may not be wealthy in the vulgar way of adventurers, and the stakes of information they seek may be different. This sage then is a different sort of encounter. Not a cost but a danger, they are a real threat in a game that doesn't assume quite so many giant monster fights, but are susceptible to some kind of negotiation.
88. Potion-seller but cheese It would be weird(?) to find that Manteu is full of classic fantasy-style potions, unless an alchemist is handing one to you directly. Better maybe to imagine that a master cheesemaker can imbue strong effects into their work. And so very French.
89. Reincarnated queen leads barbarians When I wrote this, I think I was pondering the potential dramatic effect of the different layers of pseudo-French history that could be brought into play, and I liked the idea of the Goths having some kind of continuance, however improbable, into the (early) modern day. To help bridge the gap, I thought it would be neat if some monarch or figure from midway between the periods improbably returned to lead them. A Charlizemagne, perhaps.
90. Cruel taxes trap PCs Social traps very relevant to the densely populated land of Manteu. An "exit tax" on those who pass through the land meant to target petty nobility or disliked groups can create a small crisis to resolve.
91. Fairy horse on the moors Another attempt to introduce a mount-as-treasure. Unlike the unicorn that loves purity and the evil horse that loves evil, this one should be charmed by the fulfillment of some challenge. Perhaps it can only be tamed when it is neither day nor night, or when it is mounted neither still nor running.
92. Haunted villa getting Scooby doo'd I just think it would be funny.
93. Roadside hashish den is portal to elsewhere I've heard that Alexandre Dumas was a bit of a hashish fiend,
94. Vampire in a grave freaks a town
95. Cavalry regiment raiding on behalf of queen More attempting to introduce random platoons everywhere.
96. Nomads in great treasure hunt battle Another on-ramp to a big treasure hunt, with flashy violence to draw players' attention. I imagine the majority-settled people of Manteu normally don't take nomads too seriously, so it's a good way to not blow the secret of the treasure hunt wide open.
97. long-dead knights guard bridge Another Arthurian/Medieval trope tweaked to fit into the later setting. We might imagine this bridge simply leads on to another region, to a dungeon plateau, or through a mountain pass.
98. Fort Knox. Sells vault space Another simple amenity that may be useful in the course of a campaign.
99. Bloodline of Mary Let's see, what's a gameable send-up of that Dan Brown-style myth? Haven't done much thinking about the legendary basis of C&S catholicism. Sort of don't want to precommit to one for the sake of this entry. Maybe this is a supernatural bloodline descended from Saint Cussata, who possess remarkable artistic skill and use her relics with overwhelming potence. This sort of seems like a plot element more than a good hexfill, so I consider this entry a failure😔
100. Swordwolf guards relic The lupe class can use weapons, though it is often better with tooth and fang. The main draw of an animal using a sword in its mouth is that it is pretty cool, so this guardian fulfills that potential image even when the party lacks a wolf with a cool magic sword. What relic does she guard? A phial with the tears of Saint Isaac, that hides the innocent from the cruel who pursue them, and that exudes a healing film. This must be in a high cave, with shrines dedicated to Isaac and the wolf throughout the region.
"Phlox, you didn't put a pope on the list!" The pope figure is definitely on the map, in one of the major cities. This list is for random regions that might be crossed in play, okay?
No comments:
Post a Comment